Sitefinity and web hosting companiesCancel

I've just installed Sitefinity and have to say I'm very impressed with it, having come from a dev background in MCMS and Immediacy.

The first nice thing I noticed is that Sitefinity doesn't (at least as far as I can tell) monkey around with IIS - something that other CMS products seem to do (Umbraco, DNN, etc), such as install a new website, isapi filters, etc. I'm guessing most hosting co's just wouldn't allow this on a shared server. Am I right in saying Sitefinity doesn't do anything like this?
I installed the "blank .Net project" rather than use the full exe installer if that makes a difference. From what I can see it's just a "run of the mill" ASP.Net web app and the only time I touched IIS was to create the virtual dir.

I would like to use the community edition to host a school's website with a commercial web hosting co, so I'm wondering if there any considerations, features, etc that I need to be aware of when choosing a hosting co. for Sitefinity?

First let me thank you for trying out our product and using our services.

You are absolutely right in your observations. There is in fact a difference between the full installer and the blank project. The full installer gives you a project manager, which is a different application than the CMS itself. That's what you use to create virtual directories if you are not from a dev background. But once a project is created, there's nothing touched in IIS by the CMS. We support medium trust environments, too, which makes the CMS quite suitable for shared hosting scenarios. Our customers have used the product on various hosting companies, but from what we see the most common ones are DiscoutASP and GoDaddy. To help you with your evaluation, here are two articles describing how to set up Sitefinity on those two hosting providers:

I think you fully understand to choose what type of hosting
plan to host Sitefinity CMS. But there are still some shared hosting plan out
there which allowed new website and isapi filters.

You mentioned that you
need to host a school website. How much are your target audience that you
expected? If your need your Sitefinity site to handle a lot of simultaneous
connection, it is advisable to choose dedicated asp hosting plan.

For
starting, maybe you can host it on a shared hosting plan. You can consult the
asp hosting support team from SeekDotNet.com for the Sitefinity hosting
features.

Thank you for sharing your opinion - we appreciate that. I just want to add a recent partner hosting here - http://www.sitefinity-hosting.com/
They already have several Sitefinity projects online, so you might check them out.

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